Horror and the Everyday in Post-Holocaust France

Abstract

The recent proliferation of studies of French representations of the Holocaust, dominated by trauma studies and postmodern theory, has tended to privilege the survivor testimony of Robert Antelme (author of L'Espèce humaine), the critical work of Maurice Blanchot on the unnameable and a Levinassian ethics of the other. In this article I would like to focus on a different strand in post-Holocaust art and theory in France in which the significant imaginative thinker aiming to shape a new aesthetic vision is not Blanchot but Alain Resnais's collaborator on Nuit et brouillard, Jean Cayrol. Through an analysis of Resnais's film (1955), I will consider ways in which the interplay between everyday life and horror, and especially the role of objects in this process, are central to the emergence of a reshaped artistic vision in post-Holocaust France: in the words of Cayrol, an ‘art concentrationnaire … où l'invraisemblable et le naturel se confondraient’. I will then discuss the importance of an antifascist politics of representation at the heart of this artistic vision which subsequent treatments of the Holocaust have often effaced.